Matt, I'd try to use prefix search on original string concatenated with reverse string:
Just tried on some spare table
knn=# \d spot_toulouse
Table "public.spot_toulouse"
Column | Type | Modifiers
---------------------+-------------------+-----------
clean_name | character varying |
1. create index
knn=# create index clean_name_tlz_idx on spot_toulouse using gin(to_tsvector('french', clean_name || ' ' ||
reverse(clean_name)));
2.
select clean_name from spot_toulouse where to_tsvector('french', clean_name|| ' ' || reverse(clean_name) ) @@
to_tsquery('french','the:*| et:*');
Select looks cumbersome, but you can always write wrapper functions.
The only drawback I see for now is that ranking function will a bit confused,
since coordinates of original and reversed words will be not the same,
but again, it's possible to obtain tsvector by custom function, which
aware about reversing.
Good luck and let me know if this help you.
Oleg
On Fri, 28 Jan 2011, Matt Warner wrote:
> I'm in the process of migrating a project from Oracle to Postgres and have
> run into a feature question. I know that Postgres has a full-text search
> feature, but it does not allow scanning the index (as opposed to the data).
> Specifically, in Oracle you can do "select * from table where
> contains(colname,'%part_of_word%')>1". While this isn't terribly efficient,
> it's much faster than full-scanning the raw data and is relatively quick.
>
> It doesn't seem that Postgres works this way. Attempting to do this returns
> no rows: "select * from table where to_tsvector(colname) @@
> to_tsquery('%part_of_word%')"
>
> The reason I want to do this is that the partial word search does not
> involve dictionary words (it's scanning names).
>
> Is this something Postgres can do? Or is there a different way to do scan
> the index?
>
> TIA,
>
> Matt
>
Regards,
Oleg
_____________________________________________________________
Oleg Bartunov, Research Scientist, Head of AstroNet (www.astronet.ru),
Sternberg Astronomical Institute, Moscow University, Russia
Internet: oleg@sai.msu.su, http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/
phone: +007(495)939-16-83, +007(495)939-23-83
